Our unwanted house guest

From Bloomberg Watch:

Next American City, a national non-profit quarterly magazine about making cities better, asks if New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg is overstaying his welcome by changing the term limits law for his own benefit and not the for the benefit of future politicians.

Here are some excerpts from their reporting:

“…Whatever the particulars, one can identify a trend in Bloomberg’s approach to economic development — a favoritism toward the interests of his allies, be they his wealthy neighbors on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, developers, or the Republican Party to which he belonged until recently, and a tendency toward grandiose ambitions, even when it contradicts common sense. Bloomberg recently proposed raising revenue to help cover New York’s budget shortfall not, as some Democrats had hoped, by raising income taxes on the richest New Yorkers, but by raising the regressive sales tax by half a cent on the dollar and eliminating the exemption for clothing sales of less than $110. This would mean that a janitor buying school clothes for his kids will now have to pay more in taxes, while an investment banker putting an addition on her summer house will not.